Monday Myth: Success Makes Organisations Stronger

The Winter Workshops

Why did the world's finest mechanical watches emerge from isolated villages in the Jura mountains rather than from Europe's richest cities?

It is an odd historical question. Precision engineering seems like the natural product of wealth, abundant resources and sophisticated industry. Yet the foundations of Swiss watchmaking were laid in communities that possessed remarkably little of any of them.

The workshops that appeared throughout the Jura were not created to satisfy luxury. They existed because survival demanded them. Long winters interrupted agricultural work for months at a time, forcing families to find another source of income. Every piece of brass, every steel spring and every ruby jewel represented scarce resources. Every mistake consumed materials that were difficult to replace. Every failed mechanism threatened not only a reputation but the survival of the workshop itself.

Those conditions shaped an engineering philosophy that would define an entire industry.

A mechanical watch stores remarkably little energy inside its mainspring. That limited reserve must power hundreds of interacting components for days while maintaining extraordinary precision. Friction is not simply an engineering inconvenience. It is the enemy. Every unnecessary gear steals energy. Every poorly finished surface introduces wear. Every additional mechanism creates another opportunity for failure.

The remarkable achievement of Swiss watchmaking was therefore not the accumulation of complexity. It was the relentless elimination of unnecessary complexity. Generation after generation, watchmakers refined tolerances, simplified interactions and removed mechanisms that contributed more friction than value. Precision emerged not because more parts were added, but because fewer parts wasted energy.

Their environment rewarded only one thing.

Reality.

A poorly designed escapement could not be negotiated into working. A worn pivot could not be explained away in a meeting. The mechanism either kept time or it did not.

The workshop survived because reality always had the final word.

A Computer That Could Not Fail

Three centuries later, another group of engineers confronted remarkably similar constraints under entirely different circumstances.

The Apollo Guidance Computer contained less computing power than devices now used to organise calendars or edit photographs. Its memory measured only a few dozen kilobytes. Every instruction consumed resources that simply did not exist in abundance.

Yet this modest computer guided human beings to the Moon.

Its success was not achieved despite its limitations. It was achieved because those limitations shaped every engineering decision.

The software had to anticipate failure before it occurred. Memory had to be budgeted with extraordinary discipline. Processing time had to be allocated according to priorities that could not fail under pressure. During the Apollo 11 landing, when the computer became overloaded, it discarded lower-priority tasks and protected the calculations essential for landing safely.

Modern engineers often admire that decision as an elegant software design. And it was something more fundamental. It was an act of survival.

The Apollo engineers were not optimising benchmarks or demonstrating technical sophistication. They were building a machine whose failure would almost certainly kill three people hundreds of thousands of kilometres from Earth. There would be no emergency patch, no rollback and no second deployment.

Reality would judge every decision.

The Hidden Pattern

At first glance, mountain workshops and lunar spacecraft appear to have almost nothing in common.

One was concerned with measuring time through intricate mechanical systems assembled by hand in remote villages. The other was designed to navigate the vast emptiness of space using early digital computation. Their purposes, environments and technologies could hardly be more different.

Yet beneath these differences lies a shared constraint that shaped both endeavours in remarkably similar ways.

In both cases, survival compressed the distance between actions and consequences. Decisions could not drift into abstraction because their outcomes were immediate and often irreversible. A flawed component in a watch could render it useless, just as a miscalculation in a spacecraft could jeopardise an entire mission.

When failure threatens existence itself, organisations cannot afford comfortable illusions. Waste becomes visible not through analysis but through necessity. Complexity must justify its presence because every additional element introduces risk. Experience gains value because mistakes carry tangible costs, and knowledge accumulates because forgetting leads directly to repeated failure.

It is important to recognise that scarcity alone does not guarantee excellence. Many workshops failed, and many expeditions never succeeded. Constraint by itself is not enough.

What distinguishes the successful cases is the kind of feedback their environment provides. Survival creates conditions where feedback is immediate, unambiguous and unavoidable. It forces organisations to confront reality directly, without the buffer of interpretation or delay.

Under such conditions, reality cannot be negotiated with or deferred. It must be understood and responded to, because it is the only thing that ultimately determines whether the system continues to function.

When Companies Still Live Close to Reality

Young companies experience the same phenomenon.

Not because startups employ unusually gifted people, nor because entrepreneurs possess extraordinary courage, but because survival remains close enough for everyone to feel it.

When ten people are trying to build a business, distance barely exists.

Engineers speak directly with customers. Founders remain deeply involved in technical decisions because technical decisions determine whether the company survives. Product discussions include the people who will later build, operate and support the solution. Every poor hiring decision is immediately visible. Every unnecessary meeting consumes hours that nobody can afford. Every architectural shortcut becomes tomorrow's burden for colleagues sitting only a few metres away.

Something else quietly develops under these conditions. Shared memory.

Everyone remembers why decisions were made because everyone participated in making them. Trade-offs remain visible. Mistakes become collective lessons rather than forgotten incidents. Experience is naturally respected because it shortens painful learning cycles that the organisation cannot afford to repeat.

This proximity creates behaviours that organisations often mistake for culture.

When weak ideas emerge, they are not politely tolerated or deferred for later discussion. They are examined, questioned and often rejected because everyone understands that poor decisions carry immediate consequences for the entire group.

Understanding is not pursued as an abstract ideal but as a practical necessity. Superficial knowledge quickly proves insufficient when it is tested against real constraints, forcing people to engage more deeply with the problems they are trying to solve.

Over time, individuals begin to develop instinct, not through formal training but through repeated exposure to situations where recognising early warning signs can prevent larger failures. Their judgement sharpens because their own future is directly tied to the outcomes of their decisions.

In this way, survival becomes a powerful teacher, shaping behaviours and capabilities that no leadership programme can fully replicate.

The Success Trap

Then success begins to reshape the environment in ways that are less immediately visible but deeply consequential.

Revenue increases, bringing with it a steady flow of customers and growing confidence from investors. Teams expand to handle the rising demand, and roles become more specialised as organisations seek efficiency at scale. Management layers are introduced to coordinate this complexity, and structures emerge that promise clarity and control. None of these developments are inherently problematic. In many cases, they are necessary for growth.

The risk emerges not from these changes themselves, but from what they gradually introduce.

As organisations grow, distance begins to form.

Customers are no longer encountered directly but are instead represented through dashboards and aggregated metrics. Engineers are increasingly viewed in terms of capacity and allocation rather than as individuals engaged in solving specific problems. Products are grouped into portfolios, and delivery is tracked through coloured indicators on executive reports rather than through direct observation of outcomes. Financial performance shifts from being a continuous, lived reality to something reviewed periodically in structured presentations.

Reality itself has not disappeared. However, it becomes less immediate and less tangible.

The organisation continues to believe it is responding to real conditions, yet its responses are increasingly shaped by abstractions and summaries rather than direct experience. Over time, these representations begin to stand in for reality itself, and the distinction between the two becomes harder to perceive.

Gradually, the map begins to replace the territory.

When Distance Rewards Surface Thinking

Distance changes more than communication, as it reshapes how people think and what kinds of thinking are valued.

Deep thinking depends upon memory. It requires understanding why systems evolved, remembering earlier failures and recognising trade-offs that are invisible to newcomers. Deep thinkers carry organisational history with them. They understand not only what exists, but why it exists, and they can trace the consequences of decisions across time rather than just across teams.

Surface thinking operates differently. It requires only enough knowledge to navigate the present moment and to respond convincingly to immediate demands. The latest transformation replaces the previous one without requiring a full understanding of either. New terminology displaces old terminology, dashboards stand in for direct observation, and narratives begin to substitute for mechanisms that are no longer widely understood.

As this shift takes hold, short-term memory becomes more valuable than structural understanding. People are rewarded for staying current rather than for staying grounded. This is not because individuals become less intelligent or less capable. It is because the organisation has gradually changed the behaviours it recognises and rewards.

Once consequences become distant, appearing informed often becomes more profitable than being deeply informed. Knowledge begins to give way to presentation, capability gives way to coordination, and the productive system is slowly overshadowed by the coordination system that manages it.

Success Creates Organisational Amnesia

Perhaps the greatest danger of success is not complacency but forgetting.

The Swiss workshops remembered because forgetting meant bankruptcy. Apollo remembered because forgetting meant death. Young companies remember because forgetting often means extinction. In each case, memory was not a virtue. It was a necessity enforced by immediate consequences.

Successful organisations, by contrast, can afford to forget. They forget why architectural principles were introduced and what problems those principles were designed to prevent. They forget why interfaces were designed in a particular way and what constraints shaped those decisions. They forget why standards existed and what failures originally justified them.

Over time, they inherit systems whose original purpose gradually disappears from organisational memory. Documentation attempts to preserve fragments of that knowledge, but it rarely captures the full context in which decisions were made. Processes begin to replace judgement, and governance structures attempt to compensate for the absence of shared understanding.

As this continues, the organisation slowly loses the very memory that once made intelligent decisions possible. What remains are artefacts without explanations and rules without stories, which are far more difficult to apply wisely.

The New Barbarians

History rarely ends because knowledge disappears overnight. It ends because knowledge becomes disconnected from decision-making.

Every civilisation eventually reaches a point where preserving inherited systems requires more understanding than creating them required in the first place. Roads, aqueducts and institutions survive only while enough people remember why they exist and how they should be maintained. When that memory fades, the systems may persist for a time, but their integrity gradually declines.

Organisations follow the same pattern.

The new barbarians rarely arrive from outside. They emerge quietly from within the organisation itself.

They master presentations without understanding production, and they navigate politics without understanding engineering. They learn the newest vocabulary while forgetting the oldest lessons. They inherit productive systems whose complexity they mistake for unnecessary bureaucracy because nobody remains able to explain the reasoning beneath them.

They are not malicious, nor are they intentionally destructive. They are simply operating inside an organisation that has forgotten its own memory, and they make decisions based on what is visible rather than what is understood.

The Real Myth

The myth has never been that resources are harmful. Resources have built factories, laboratories, observatories and spacecraft, and they remain essential for progress.

The myth is believing that success automatically strengthens the organisations that acquire those resources. Success changes the environment in subtle but significant ways. It weakens feedback, lengthens the distance between decisions and consequences, and allows organisations to mistake coordination for capability, activity for progress and surface knowledge for understanding.

The Swiss watchmaker could never afford that illusion because every unnecessary movement stole energy from the mechanism and reduced its ability to keep time. The Apollo engineer could never afford it because every unnecessary instruction consumed memory that might later preserve human life.

Perhaps enduring organisations obey exactly the same law. Their strength is not measured by the resources they possess after becoming successful, but by their ability to remember and preserve the disciplines that survival once taught them, even after survival has ceased to be immediately visible.